The Yearly Sift 2016

One of the things I like best about writing the Sift is that it keeps me focused in the present, with an eye to the future. But once a year I try to take a broader perspective on where we’ve been.

2016 was the most dismal year I’ve had to look back on since this blog started — leading, as it did, to the present moment, in which President-elect Trump is assembling his henchmen and deciding which aspects of the world order to screw up first. Not only was I very consistently wrong about what would happen next in 2016, but looking back at the plausible arguments and scenarios I laid out only emphasizes how many times and in how many ways events could have taken a turn for the better, but didn’t — right up to election night, when shifting a handful of votes from one state to another would have changed the outcome.

But prognostication has never been the primary purpose of the Weekly Sift. (In fact, one of my major criticisms of mainstream media is that it spends too much time on speculation, rather than telling us what is happening and why.) Primarily, I’m trying to cut through the hype and propaganda to focus my readers’ attention on what is real and give them tools to think about it effectively. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to know what will happen next, because I certainly don’t.

The themes

I’ve broken the primary theme out into its own article “The Year of This-can’t-be-happening“. It covers my repeated attempts — from the beginning of the year to the end — to understand how anyone could support Donald Trump and what could be done to persuade them not to.

And finally, there were a number of posts about the Bernie/Hillary split in the Democratic Party. Early in the year, I had to decide who to vote for in the New Hampshire primary. Bernie better expressed my ideals, but I had more faith in Hillary as a candidate. (I still think Bernie’s supporters underestimate how vulnerable he would have been if Republicans had ever taken him seriously, a position I laid out in “Smearing Bernie: a preview” and “Do we still have to worry about the McGovern problem?“) My decision process — ultimately resulting in a Bernie vote — played out in “Undecided with 8 days to go” and “Imperfections“.

Late in the year, I tried to persuade Bernie supporters to unite around Hillary — a position in line with the one Bernie ultimately took himself (which I explained in “Why Bernie Backed Hillary“.)

Themes for 2017

In general, I never saw the Bernie/Hillary argument as being about goals. Rather, it seemed to me to revolve around methods and tactics: Is it better to push for big, revolutionary changes or to head in the same direction in incremental steps? And I was skeptical that electing a progressive president could actually bring about that revolution without a more fundamental re-education of the electorate, as I spelled out in “Say — You Want a Revolution?”

That’s an argument that continues into the future, even if neither Hillary nor Bernie runs again. I’m not sure why it has been so hard for candidates to straddle the difference: This is where we want to go ultimately, and this is the next step we want to take to get there. Preserving and patching up ObamaCare is not an end in itself, but we’re also not going to pass single-payer any time soon.

A theme I announced after the election, which I hope to continue into 2017, is that liberals have to begin re-arguing issues we used to think were long decided, but which the Trump victory proves are still open. The first of those posts was “Should I Have White Pride?“.

The numbers

The blog’s traffic statistics tell two contrasting stories. On the one hand, this year the Sift had no breakout viral posts, or posts from previous years that went on a viral second run. As a result, the overall page view numbers are down: from 782,000 in 2015 and even 415K in 2014 to somewhere around 350K this year (with a few days to go).

On the other hand, all the signs of regular readership are up. The number of people following the blog (according to WordPress; I have no idea exactly what they’re counting, but I assume it’s comparable from year to year) rose from 3820 to 4269. Hits on the home page, weeklysift.com, held the gains of 2015: from 44K in 2014 to 100K in 2015 to 101K this year. (I interpret that as views from people who are not looking for any particular post, but have the site bookmarked and want to see what’s new.)

Two years ago, a 1000-view post seemed like a big deal; sometimes I’d go a whole month without one. This year, the featured post each week almost always topped 1000.

Most encouragingly, the number of comments continued its upward trend: from 879 in 2014 to 1432 in 2015 to 1751 so far in 2016.

Viral posts, as I point out every year, are unpredictable. Some years they happen, some years they don’t. Hall of Fame baseball player George Brett used to claim that most of his home runs were mistakes: He was trying to hit line drives, but sometimes he swung just slightly under a pitch and it went up and out of the park. If he tried to do that, he knew, he might hit a few more home runs, but he’d also wind up with a lot more pop-ups and strikeouts.

That’s how I feel about viral posts. Every week, I’m trying to serve the needs of my regular readers. If once in a while that intention produces something that gets the attention of a larger public, that’s great. But if I tried to swing for those home runs, I think the overall quality of the blog would decline.

I am a relatively recent reader of your blog, so I can’t speak to years past. However I think a reason for your fewer viral blogs this year may be that there were just SO MANY blogs and opinion pieces being written! Everyone had something to say about this vile, flamboyant election. I would think that would spread the readers more thinly. Just a thought. I look forward to The Sift every Monday. Keep writing!!

While I appreciate getting the posts in the emails, that means I rarely, if ever, hit the blog itself. I forward the emails, not the links to the blog (although I did forward links to Not a Tea Party). Hope your list is growing; that should count, too. Thank you for what you do.

I have become a regular reader of your blog. I am not a good responder. I have this habit of wanting to think about what you write for awhile But, I have taken some of your posts
and used them in discussion groups in and out of my local UU congregation. Thank you for that, and please keep on writing. You come before the NY Times and my local Albany, NY Times Union on Mondays.

I want to ask, though, what has happened to our society to cause fake news and lies to be more influential than real news and good analysis? Fake news and lies have always been with us, but for some reason they have become in many ways more attractive to citizens than real news and analysis.

This is a social problem, not a problem of those presenting the material. What is the social problem and what is its’ source?

Don’t you think people have become lazy in their intellectual probing of what they hear? Whether out of conscious rejection of other points of view or through a conscious choice to live within the filter of one’s comfort zone (FOX News, Breitbart, etc), people are not thinking critically…and I am not necessarily referring to “low information” people. There is also the very real factor of disappearance of tolerance and respect for other points of view.

Thanks and I echo the comments above. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I read your articles via email (and also forward them via email to others). Do your stats reflect your email readership? Many weeks I do not go to the website.

They don’t. But I assume the percentages stay relatively constant, I.e., posts with more on-site views are also forwarded more as emails. I hope you won’t bother trying to juke the stats for me. It’s not like I have advertisers who would care.

Doug, thank you for being the logical, insightful writer that we can trust for factual writing. I too, read the email articles and go to the site primarily to post on Facebook. But I share them via email all of the time. I am with you with the resistance we will need over the next few years and scared to death.

I’d like to add to the chorus of gratitude for the Sift, Doug. One of the fascinating and sometimes frustrating themes for the year from this reader’s perspective was the projection done by moderate and conservative democrats, usually onto Trump supporters. Addressing their moral and intellectual failings as much as is done for Trump voters should yield interesting results.

Regarding the Bernie/Hillary argument, maybe the inability to see it as a difference in goals is closely related to how consistently (and in the end, how tragically) the situation was misread. Looking forward to the fruits of your 2017 call to action regarding the critical re-examination of issues among liberals. Clearly we need it! Keep up the good fight.

I came to your conclusion on 09 Nov, that the Stupids elected Trump. But there are a few more things:
1. Stupidity promotes more stupidity. I don’t think you can break into this cycle by making smart arguments or citing facts.
2. You think they will see through Trump. I thought that about Bush, but after
two failed wars, a near-fatal assault on the economy, and much more, they are still stupid.
3. when Trump bungles, they will invent new reasons why it is someone else’s fault. Stupid news rationalizes stupidity.
4. The Stupids in Kansas do not see what is happening to them while it is happening. (I used to live in Kansas, and I’m amazed.) Look to KS for the future of US.
….but in the end, I have no better plan than you do.

Thanks for writing the Sift, Doug. I don’t remember which post led me here–probably either “Privilege” or “Not a Tea Party”–but I immediately added your homepage to my browser bookmarks and I check it faithfully every Monday.

“In general, I never saw the Bernie/Hillary argument as being about goals. Rather, it seemed to me to revolve around methods and tactics: Is it better to push for big, revolutionary changes or to head in the same direction in incremental steps?” And Hilary Clinton promised incremental steps towards what, exactly?

Thank you for The Weekly Sift: I find it thought provoking and am grateful to the friend who recommended it! I find it one of the sane voices in the midst of the cacophony of voices around politics and values. And it is a voice I trust to stimulate my own thinking! Keep it up, despite whether you have home runs or just line drives (this week’s metaphor!)

Just another lurker emerging from the shadows to say a very sincere thank you for your always-insightful blog. I come to the site every Sunday as part of my favourite weekly routine. In this bewildering, frustrating, and genuinely frightening year, I really enjoyed your deeper probing and attempts to understand wtf was actually happening in the minds of Trump himself as well as his supporters. I am Canadian, so I fully recognize that I simply don’t have all of the context necessary to understand socioeconomic issues in the USA. But here in Canada, our Conservative party is selecting a new leader, and my biggest fear is that a Trumplike candidate could gain the party’s leadership and win the next federal election (which is luckily a few years away – hopefully long enough for people to finally see that the emperor has no clothes).
Anyway, thank you again for the time and energy that you put into your blog. I look forward to your take on what will certainly be another interesting year@